Picketing the Zeitgeist: War and the Form of Writing by R. M. Berry

PICKETING THE ZEITGEIST War a??,? the Forvu, of Writing ba R.. M. Berry Shortly after 10 p.m. Eastern Time on the night of March 19, 2003, George Bush appeared on national television to tell America that we'd started to bomb Iraq. His brief address was marked by a sense of presentness, of self-conscious contemporaneity, wholly missing from his prewar polemics. His first words stressed the moment of speaking: "My fellow citizens, at this hour. ..." Ofthe thirty-three sentences that followed, nearly two-thirds were in the present tense. The adverb "now" appeared repeatedly, as did phrases suggesting a threshold or incipience: "early stages," "opening stages," "enters," "we come." Although he was anxious to connect this present hour to a particular future—the auxiliary verb "will" occurred sixteen times—exactly what we were entering remained abstract. Bush spoke of a campaign, a commitment, a conflict, a passage, a time. His most concrete description referred to a military operation "to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger." If no one now believes that these words describe what, four years ago, we were in the early stages of, then that's not just because Bush was lying. Or if we want to speak of lies, then we should imagine a vaster conspiracy, one spreading far beyond the White House and including our news media, Internet blogs, midnight bar quarrels , and the writing I am doing here. Today, as presidential hopefuls scramble to retract their votes, lamenting that if only they'd known in October of 2002 what they know now. . ., we need to acknowledge that our bombing of Iraq was, if not already decided before the debate about WMDs, then foretold, fated. Although I don't believe literary forms cause actions — I believe, on the contrary, that literary forms are actions—I'm pretty sure that the form of our prewar discourse predetermined our present catastrophe as surely as driving full-speed ahead predetermines spinning out on curves. Whatever our leaders now think they know that they didn't know in 2002 would've had no effect. Ofthe remainder ofthe thirty-three sentences in Bush's short speech, a third were in the future tense—"We will pass through this time of peril. . .We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others"—and none were in the past. Only one sentence, positioned squarely in the middle of his remarks, was in the conditional. It alone suggested that the limits of what we'd entered into might not be anything we could foresee: "A campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict." Was there anyone in America who didn't already know this? Then why, as the bombs started to fall, did Bush need to tell us? In his 1953 book, Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes maintains that the political significance of a writer's work is not its communicable content or political subject matter, but its form, its particular mode of discursive action. For him, the history of modern literature represented an effort to achieve a genuinely democratic form of expression, articulating interests that were broadly human, not the interests of a particular class or group. The developing suspicion during the nineteenth century that broadly human interests were just class interests by another name turned this effort against itself, creating a crisis in the writer's vocation. According to Barthes, subsequent writers felt compelled either to identify with the political left, expressing interests already known prior to their literary formation, or to remove from their work the form ofliterariness altogether, to purify writing of its covertly imperialist ambitions. This latter project, Barthes's infamous zero-degree l'écriture, strikes many today as too rarified to be politically productive, but for Barthes, as for his predecessorTheodorW. Adorno, it realized writing's agency. By refusing the bad-faith compromises of tropes, canons of taste, and mass marketing, a writer could establish solidarity with all those whom literature's institutions had failed to acknowledge, making her work's alienness a sign of hope. JeanFran çois Lyotard would later describe such work...